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More Corn Between Bloggers' Teeth
09/17/2003

I meant to post this yesterday, but I'm behind on just about everything. Steve Verdon has done more analysis of David Corn's slippery rhetoric. Steve even found a PDF of a table that shows from where Corn got his Elementary and Secondary Education numbers.

Poke around on the Internet, and you'll find that people have actually been taken in by Corn's sleight of hand to make Bush's "26% increase" line seem like a lie. Here's my comment on that point:

I got the 26% using the new PDF that you provide.

It seems like the actual error on the part of the speechwriters was the phrase "Elementary and Secondary," because the data all aligns with total ed. budgets, suggesting that it was the total that Bush meant to tout. Comparing the $53.1 billion in the 2004 proposed budget with the 2001 total appropriations ($42.2 billion) yields an increase of 25.8%.

As I said in my own (much too time-consuming) post on the topic, nobody should disparage Corn's proofreading ability, nor his ability to generate propaganda. His honesty? Well, that's another question.

I'm afraid, however, that this liberal lie is already out there as common knowledge for anybody who wants to see it as such. (Who's going to spend all this time with a calculator when they want to agree with the error anyway?)

Of course, my preference would have been for Bush to cut the budget and brag about that...

Posted by Justin Katz @ 02:59 PM EST